Gravitational waves send text messages directly to Chad Hanna’s cellphone. His team’s computer codes—all 250,000 of them—constantly listen to the heavens for the telltale sound of a ripple through spacetime. When one burbles toward Earth and lands in the wave detector, and the supercomputer crunches the numbers and realizes what it is, Hanna’s phone thrums. That’s how he heard the second-ever gravitational wave detection at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, which scientists will announce today.

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The waves took about one second to crash into LIGO, and Hanna’s computer software picked them up about 70 seconds later. But they took about 1.4 billion years to reach Earth, after rippling out from the final cataclysmic 27 orbits of a pair of black holes before they merged.

The waves are ripples in the curvature of spacetime, and they were predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, though he believed they would never be found. You can compare them to what happens when you drop a pebble in a pond. The mass of the pebble forces water to move out of the way, and it radiates outward, eventually reaching the shoreline as a little wave. LIGO was built to detect the faint lapping of these gravitational waves arriving at Earth.

The first discovery, announced in February, was an astounding achievement for physics and astronomy—it proved Einstein right, and opened a new window into the cosmos. Scientists say it is like gaining the sense of touch, after years of only being able to see and hear. But like with any scientific endeavor, you want more than one data point, and that’s what makes today’s announcement a big one.

“The excitement around the first of anything is obviously enormous, but this one is really on par,” Hanna told me. “The thing with having only one is, while we’re certain that was a gravitational wave, you don’t know if you happened to get lucky. When we got the second one, we’re all breathing a sigh of relief. Not that we had any doubts about the first one, but this establishes the idea that these are common enough that we hope to make regular observations.”

The second wave detection involved two smaller black holes whose consummation happened about 1.4 billion years ago. The black holes were about 14 and 8 times the mass of the sun, and their merger birthed a single, spinning black hole that was 21 times the mass of our sun. As they gradually approached each other, they lost energy in the form of gravitational waves. One sun’s worth of mass was left over, and this is what LIGO detected.

The black holes were smaller than the ones that produced LIGO’s first detection, which meant the signal lasted about a second, and this made them much harder to find. The first wave sounded kind of like a thud. The newer detection sounded more like a chirp, but its amplitude was significantly below the detectors’ noise level, Hanna says.

LIGO detects gravitational waves by looking for a slight disruption in light. It has two 2.5-mile-long arms arranged in an L, and a split beam of laser light pulses back and forth between mirrors at the end of the arms. The laser light measures the distance between the mirrors. An incoming wave would warp the arms just a bit, making one longer or shorter than the other, which would change the time it takes the light to arrive. By a bit, I mean the difference is exquisite — a ten-thousandth of the diameter of a single proton. The wave scientists are trying to detect is smaller than the atoms that make up the detector.

“They are a little bit different, but they are all Waldos. You have to look for something that really does look like a Waldo.”

This insane sensitivity means background noises can easily interfere with the measurements. Things like washing machines in nearby homes, waves on distant shorelines, and airplanes flying thousands of feet overhead can all get in the way. That’s where Hanna and his codes come in.

Thanks to Einstein, scientists know what to listen for, so Hanna and his collaborators populated LIGO’s computers with software that can pick out the waves above the din. Hanna likens it to a Where’s Waldo painting.

“The scenes are full of crazy stuff. There are all kinds of things going on. But you know what you’re looking for. You are sure what Waldo looks like,” he says. “We’re in the same situation. We’re not throwing models around to make the data fit. We have a family of Waldos—maybe one has a red cap, one has an orange cap. They are a little bit different, but they are all Waldos. You have to look for something that really does look like a Waldo.”

In this scenario, there are 250,000 possible Waldos, and a supercomputer searches for all their telltale characteristics at the same time. A specific type of chirp triggers an alert to a database, which does some additional calculations, and if the signal crosses a set of thresholds, the computer notifies the humans. People have set up different alert systems, and if someone happens to be at his computer, she might get a popup or an email. Hanna set it up to send him text messages.

“It would be cool if we had a computer program, or something saying, ‘Good morning, Chad. You have detected a gravitational wave.’ We could do that, but we need a little more money,” he says with a laugh.

Now that physicists have seen two black hole mergers, we can start to make inferences about a lot of things—like how often we might be hearing the birth cries of black holes, and how many sun-sized black holes there are. The detector will be able to hear death, too, in the violent endings of massive stars. Scientists want to use it to study neutron stars, including centimeter-high “mountains” on their surfaces that could make them spin as pulsars. This second wave finally puts the word “observation” in LIGO, in other words.

And it is only going to get better. LIGO is continually being upgraded, and changes to the detector—and algorithms—will enable it to see 10 times farther into space. This means a 1,000-fold increase in the volume of space scientists like Hanna can search.

“What you’re seeing is basically the first round of things. We literally don’t have enough human power or money to search for everything we want,” he says.

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Congressional Republicans and conservative pundits had the chance to signal Trump his attacks on law enforcement are unacceptable—but they sent the opposite message.

President Trump raged at his TV on Sunday morning. And yet on balance, he had a pretty good weekend. He got a measure of revenge upon the hated FBI, firing former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe two days before his pension vested. He successfully coerced his balky attorney general, Jeff Sessions, into speeding up the FBI’s processes to enable the firing before McCabe’s retirement date.

Beyond this vindictive fun for the president, he achieved something politically important. The Trump administration is offering a not very convincing story about the McCabe firing. It is insisting that the decision was taken internally by the Department of Justice, and that the president’s repeated and emphatic demands—public and private—had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

The first female speaker of the House has become the most effec­tive congressional leader of modern times—and, not coinciden­tally, the most vilified.

Last May, TheWashington Post’s James Hohmann noted “an uncovered dynamic” that helped explain the GOP’s failure to repeal Obamacare. Three current Democratic House members had opposed the Affordable Care Act when it first passed. Twelve Democratic House members represent districts that Donald Trump won. Yet none voted for repeal. The “uncovered dynamic,” Hohmann suggested, was Nancy Pelosi’s skill at keeping her party in line.

She’s been keeping it in line for more than a decade. In 2005, George W. Bush launched his second presidential term with an aggressive push to partially privatize Social Security. For nine months, Republicans demanded that Democrats admit the retirement system was in crisis and offer their own program to change it. Pelosi refused. Democratic members of Congress hosted more than 1,000 town-hall meetings to rally opposition to privatization. That fall, Republicans backed down, and Bush’s second term never recovered.

Invented centuries ago in France, the bidet has never taken off in the States. That might be changing.

“It’s been completely Americanized!” my host declares proudly. “The bidet is gone!” In my time as a travel editor, this scenario has become common when touring improvements to hotels and resorts around the world. My heart sinks when I hear it. To me, this doesn’t feel like progress, but prejudice.

Americans seem especially baffled by these basins. Even seasoned American travelers are unsure of their purpose: One globe-trotter asked me, “Why do the bathrooms in this hotel have both toilets and urinals?” And even if they understand the bidet’s function, Americans often fail to see its appeal. Attempts to popularize the bidet in the United States have failed before, but recent efforts continue—and perhaps they might even succeed in bringing this Old World device to new backsides.

How evangelicals, once culturally confident, became an anxious minority seeking political protection from the least traditionally religious president in living memory

One of the most extraordinary things about our current politics—really, one of the most extraordinary developments of recent political history—is the loyal adherence of religious conservatives to Donald Trump. The president won four-fifths of the votes of white evangelical Christians. This was a higher level of support than either Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, an outspoken evangelical himself, ever received.

Trump’s background and beliefs could hardly be more incompatible with traditional Christian models of life and leadership. Trump’s past political stances (he once supported the right to partial-birth abortion), his character (he has bragged about sexually assaulting women), and even his language (he introduced the words pussy and shithole into presidential discourse) would more naturally lead religious conservatives toward exorcism than alliance. This is a man who has cruelly publicized his infidelities, made disturbing sexual comments about his elder daughter, and boasted about the size of his penis on the debate stage. His lawyer reportedly arranged a $130,000 payment to a porn star to dissuade her from disclosing an alleged affair. Yet religious conservatives who once blanched at PG-13 public standards now yawn at such NC-17 maneuvers. We are a long way from The Book of Virtues.

As the Trump presidency approaches a troubling tipping point, it’s time to find the right term for what’s happening to democracy.

Here is something that, even on its own, is astonishing: The president of the United States demanded the firing of the former FBI deputy director, a career civil servant, after tormenting him both publicly and privately—and it worked.

The American public still doesn’t know in any detail what Andrew McCabe, who was dismissed late Friday night, is supposed to have done. But citizens can see exactly what Donald Trump did to McCabe. And the president’s actions are corroding the independence that a healthy constitutional democracy needs in its law enforcement and intelligence apparatus.

McCabe’s firing is part of a pattern. It follows the summary removal of the previous FBI director and comes amid Trump’s repeated threats to fire the attorney general, the deputy attorney, and the special counsel who is investigating him and his associates. McCabe’s ouster unfolded against a chaotic political backdrop which includes Trump’s repeated calls for investigations of his political opponents, demands of loyalty from senior law enforcement officials, and declarations that the job of those officials is to protect him from investigation.

Among the more practical advice that can be offered to international travelers is wisdom of the bathroom. So let me say, as someone who recently returned from China, that you should be prepared to one, carry your own toilet paper and two, practice your squat.

I do not mean those goofy chairless sits you see at the gym. No, toned glutes will not save you here. I mean the deep squat, where you plop your butt down as far as it can go while staying aloft and balanced on the heels. This position—in contrast to deep squatting on your toes as most Americans naturally attempt instead—is so stable that people in China can hold it for minutes and perhaps even hours ...

Much more than time separates the 27th president from the 45th: from their vastly different views on economics, to their conceptions of the presidency itself.

As Donald Trump’s executive orders punishing steel and aluminum imports threaten a trade war around the globe, Republicans on Capitol Hill are debating whether to reassert Congress’s ultimate constitutional authority over tariffs and trade. This isn’t the first time the GOP has split itself in two on the question of protective tariffs. But the last time, just over 100 years ago, the Republican president’s policies were the exact opposite of Trump’s.

William Howard Taft—in his opposition to populism and protectionism, as well as his devotion to constitutional limits on the powers of the presidency—was essentially the anti-Trump. Unlike the current president, and his own predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, Taft refused to rule by executive order, insisting that the chief executive could only exercise those powers that the Constitution explicitly authorizes.

Scholars have been sounding the alarm about data-harvesting firms for nearly a decade. The latest Cambridge Analytica scandal shows it may be too late to stop them.

On Friday night, Facebook suspended the account of Cambridge Analytica, the political-data company backed by the billionaire Robert Mercer that consulted on both the Brexit and Trump campaigns.

The action came just before The Guardian and The New York Timesdropped major reports in which the whistle-blower Christopher Wylie alleged that Cambridge Analytica had used data that an academic had allegedly improperly exfiltrated from the social network. These new stories, backed by Wylie’s account and internal documents, followed years of reporting by The Guardianand The Intercept about the possible problem.

The details could seem Byzantine. Aleksandr Kogan, then a Cambridge academic, founded a company, Global Science Research, and immediately took on a major client, Strategic Communication Laboratories, which eventually gave birth to Cambridge Analytica. (Steve Bannon, an adviser to the company and a former senior adviser to Trump, reportedly picked the name.)

The debate around sexual-harassment legislation is playing out in the Maryland General Assembly, where reform advocates say leadership is loath to embrace changes.

In Maryland, legislative sessions run 90 days, from January through early April. On the final day of each session—commonly referred to by the Latin term sine die—the capital city of Annapolis lets its hair down. There is dining and dancing and parties galore as aides, lawmakers, and lobbyists celebrate having survived the season.

A few years back, at one sine die soiree hosted by a legislator, a former Annapolis aide (who requested anonymity because she remains involved in Maryland politics) took to the dance floor. “I was dancing a little bit by myself,” she recalled. “All of a sudden I hear, ‘You’re packing a little bit more than I thought back here!’ I turn around, and this legislator is dancing right behind me. I was like, ‘Ooookay. This is a little weird. I know your wife and kids.’ So I tried to subtly move away.” The legislator followed, recalled the ex-aide. And then: “He got aroused.” The young woman made a swift escape, and, she informed me, “I have not spoken to that legislator one-on-one since.”

Although the former secretary of state’s contentious relationship with the president didn’t help matters, Tillerson’s management style left a department in disarray.

Rex Tillerson is hardly the first person to be targeted in a tweet from Donald Trump, but on Tuesday morning, he became the first Cabinet official to be fired by one. It was an ignominious end to Tillerson’s 13-month stint as secretary of state, a tenure that would have been undistinguished if it weren’t so entirely destructive.

Compared with expectations for other members of Trump’s Cabinet, the disastrous results of Tillerson’s time in office are somewhat surprising. Unlike the EPA’s Scott Pruitt, Tillerson did not have obvious antipathy for the department he headed; unlike HUD’s Ben Carson, he had professional experience that was relevant to the job; and unlike Education’s Betsy DeVos, his confirmation hearing wasn't a disaster.